“Acquainted With Grief”

He is . . . a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief —Isaiah 53:3

We are not “acquainted with grief” in the same way our Lord was acquainted with it. We endure it and live through it, but we do not become intimate with it. At the beginning of our lives we do not bring ourselves to the point of dealing with the reality of sin. We look at life through the eyes of reason and say that if a person will control his instincts, and educate himself, he can produce a life that will slowly evolve into the life of God. But as we continue on through life, we find the presence of something which we have not yet taken into account, namely, sin— and it upsets all of our thinking and our plans. Sin has made the foundation of our thinking unpredictable, uncontrollable, and irrational.

We have to recognize that sin is a fact of life, not just a shortcoming. Sin is blatant mutiny against God, and either sin or God must die in my life. The New Testament brings us right down to this one issue— if sin rules in me, God’s life in me will be killed; if God rules in me, sin in me will be killed. There is nothing more fundamental than that. The culmination of sin was the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and what was true in the history of God on earth will also be true in your history and in mine— that is, sin will kill the life of God in us. We must mentally bring ourselves to terms with this fact of sin. It is the only explanation why Jesus Christ came to earth, and it is the explanation of the grief and sorrow of life.

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常經憂患

他……多受痛苦，常經憂患。 （賽五十三3）

我們所經的憂患與主所經的不同；我們是忍受、經歷，卻與憂患沒有密切的關係。我們從起頭就不肯接受罪惡這個事實，對人生採取一種合乎理性的觀點，以為人只要約束自己，教育自己，生命就能逐漸似神。可是日久便發覺有一種東西存在，是意想之外的，就是罪。它把我們一切籌算破壞了。罪使事物本末倒置，毫無道理可言。我們必須承認罪是一個事實，不是一種缺陷；罪是對神赤手空拳的反叛。在我生命中不是神死，就是罪死。新約的真理使我們面對這個問題。若罪在我裡面掌權，神在我裡面的生命就死了；若神在我裡面掌權，罪在我裡面就要死；除此之外，不可能有別的結果了。人滔天的大罪，就是把耶穌基督釘在十架上。神在世上的歷史如何，你我的生命史上也必如何。我們必須承認，罪是人生苦痛憂患的因由。

祈禱◆噢，主啊，你是沒有時間性的，因為[在你看來，千年如已過的昨日]；可是，對我這卻截然不同。你彌補我那被腐敗所吞蝕的年日，在基督耶穌裡使我成為一個新造的人！求你接納我對你的感恩。